Peel Sessions

Album Review

The amazing thing about Galaxie 500, as evidenced by the many covers featured on their excellent Uncollected disc and the box set, is their ability to take a song, cover it, and make it into something uniquely their own, sounding as if the song emanated from the minds of the group themselves. Capturing their October, 1989 and November, 1990 Peel Sessions for BBC Radio, this disc includes songs from Jonathan Richman, the Sex Pistols, Young Marble Giants, and Buffy Sainte-Marie, all falling under Galaxie 500's spell, with the remainder of the disc being rounded out by various EP and album cuts. The band is in top form, sounding every bit as fresh and relevant in 2005 as they did 15-years prior. There's a good chance die-hard fans will already own bootlegged copies of this with substantially worse sonic quality; the high pedigree of sonic quality here is enough to warrant purchasing this disc, even for the most stalwart of fans.